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Cleveland, Ohio
But some kind of madness is swallowing me whole
IM Pei's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame still stands on the shore of Lake Erie, despite the fact that huge sections of the cladding appear to have fallen right off. I guess that $22 a ticket isn't enough to pay for building maintenance.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, kind of like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, is one of those places that every American should visit at least once. Unlike the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, it has fun pop culture artifacts like the cars used in the spectacular U2 Zoo TV tour (the first outdoor stadium concert tour I ever attended) as well as the tattered canopy from New York’s CBGBs, which I had been to and still like to describe as being located on whichever level of hell it is that has no building codes.
This is the main atrium of the Cleveland Art Museum, where the historic original building meets up with the addition by Rafael Vinoly. The Cleveland Museum of Art is located in a pleasant park like setting near Case Western University, and far enough from downtown that I ended up driving, although in retrospect I probably could have taken the RTA Red Line there if I researched it a bit more first.
There was a memorable temporary installation at the Cleveland Museum of Art: Work Number 965: Half the air in a given space by Martin Creed. The installation is a whole room really, really full of purple balloons, between six and eight feet high deep. After a long wait (about an hour) they push the door open and let you squeeze on in, pushing the balloons out of the way and doing your best to avoid walking into someone else. The experience is both wonderful and terrifying, especially once you get your head above all of the purple and see the disruption of flying balloons indicating that others approaching you on a collision course.
Within walking distance of the Cleveland Museum of Art is the new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, or MOCA Cleveland. It’s a contemporary art museum designed by Farshid Moussavi, one of the (former) partners if Foreign Office Architects. The building is small but impressive, with its crystal cut exterior and rough interior, all stairs with (all things considered) hardly any actual gallery space.
We’re finishing our short trip to Cleveland with some pictures inside (and just outside) MOCA Cleveland, comparing and contrasting the smooth polished exterior with the rougher art filled inside.
